Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

1: Violence, Homelessness, and Women

= 1 = Violence, Homelessness, and Women The feeling of being homeless is feeling unwanted, feeling not belonging, feeling different. Feeling that people—you’re not part of society. That you’re separate. You live on a totally different planet. Being abused is almost the same feeling. The abusive want to hurt you. They want to control you. They look at you as a nobody, a punching bag. —Tamara What we know about women who live on the street—and about their experiences with violence, both as children and as adults—is limited. Many dozens of studies of physical and sexual violence committed against homeless women have been published; comprehensive reviews of this literature include Greenan (2004), National Center on Family Homelessness (2004), and Wenzel, Leake, and Gelberg (2001). Many of these studies, however, have been more concerned with establishing the fact that violence is committed against these extremely vulnerable women than with exploring the context and experience of this violence, especially in terms of contributing risk factors, the role of violence in the etiology and dynamics of homelessness among women, or the consequences of violence in other areas of these women’s lives. In short, prior research has only presented a bird’s-eye view of women’s experiences with violence on the street. Yet without a more complete understanding of the realities of living on the street or in a shelter , and everything that these living conditions entail, we cannot possibly hope to eliminate these experiences of violence or even design policies that might ameliorate them. The Florida Four-City Study of Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women, the results of which comprise the gist of this book, was designed to provide a more complete picture of violence in the lives of women without a home. What follows are the words and stories of 2 HARD LIVES, MEAN STREETS more than 700 homeless women who have experienced hard lives on mean streets; we have used pseudonyms for the women we interviewed. Virtually everyone agrees that the rates of violence against homeless women are high, measured against any standard. As Wright, Rubin, and Devine (1998, 155) note, “physical and sexual violence and exploitation are exceedingly common elements in the lives of homeless women and are, indeed, a major precipitating factor for homelessness among women.” Some characteristic >ndings are that “women in a New York shelter were 106 times more likely to be raped, 41 times more likely to be robbed, and 15 times more likely to be assaulted than were housed African-American women” (D’Ercole and Struening 1990). Likewise, a third of the homeless women interviewed by Hil>ker (1989) reported having been raped. Wood, Valdez, Hayashi, and Shen (1990) compared homeless mothers to poor but domiciled women in Los Angeles; the homeless mothers reported more abuse by spouses than the comparison group did (35% to 16%), more childhood physical and sexual abuse (28% to 10%), and more drug use (43% to 30%) and psychiatric problems (14% to 6%). What these statistics tell us is that victimization is widespread, and that homeless women face tremendous obstacles. What they do not tell us is what these experiences mean to the women who live them every day, women like Tamara: I had to work. I had to go to work presentable. I couldn’t go there looking like I had just slept on the street. Mentally and physically, I was stressed out. I couldn’t sleep fully at night because you scared. So you sleep like with one eye open and one eye closed. You don’t totally get rest. There’s no way you’re gonna go lay down in the street and get a full night’s sleep. Because you’re too scared. So every day I was fighting to keep my sanity. To go to work and be with my coworkers on a normal basis. After dealing with homeless men trying to have sex with me, trying to take my money, talking to homeless women that’s talking out of they head or they mental, sleeping in the street hoping that nobody is going to come and kill me in my sleep or a rat’s gonna come and bite me, and then prepare myself to look presentable, to go to work and talk on a normal average level among my coworkers and my boss, not to be sleepy, not to look drained—it was stressful. Unfortunately Tamara’s experiences are not uncommon. Wright, Devine , and Joyner (1993...